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Topic: DNC protest newspaper (Read 1135 times)

I'm part of a group that produced a b&w leftist newspaper supporting upcoming protests against the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. We used Scribus 1.5.2 which did a fantastic job. None of us are designers or layout professionals, but we did the best we could. We were really happy with the print result, which is being distributed as I write this.

It's really good to see Scribus being used for things that matter to a lot of people.

There are bits and bobs here and there which I'd personally change but that would just be me being way too picky and most readers wouldn't notice a problem.

One thing I would mention though is that most of the images seem to be a bit "washed out". Was this a deliberate move - for example because of printing costs - or is it just how things came out? I don't have a problem with it, I'm just curious in case you'd like some help.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen any kind of "donate" link for Scribus. (See this forum thread: http://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=920.0 ) I'm sure a project manager/moderator will be able to give you some suggestions about how you could help.

the only thing i would add: aligning the main text to the baseline grid.when you have multiple column, the text lines should be on the same height, across the columns.

and concerning the donation: currently, scribus needs more man power than money...so if you're willing to put a few hours into scribus, just tell us how many hours your budget is and we will try to find a list of tasks you could contribute :-) (no programming needed)

It's true, the images do look a little washed out. We printed on B&W newsprint and lightened images significantly because we've had problems with images printing too dark on past projects. We weren't able to look at print proofs, because our printer was in another city. I think maybe the problem is that we should have upped the contrast for higher impact? Any advice you have, GarryP, would certainly be appreciated!

a.l.e Yes, definitely! I only discovered the baseline grid two days ago, wish I'd known about it earlier. For one or two articles, we adjusted line spacing to take up some whitespace, which looks odd and is a terrible hack, but we weren't skilled/creative enough to use other ways to address that problem.

Will investigate on the wiki what needs work, and whether I can contribute in that way! As it happens, I am a programmer.

I thought you might have lightened the pictures if you were printing at home to use less ink but if you've had problems in the past and can't get print proofs then it makes sense to go with something that works rather than messing around and keeping your fingers crossed.

All I was going to suggest was to use something like GIMP to alter the levels. If anyone is interested then go to "Colours -> Levels" and try moving the slider "tabs" underneath the input histogram until the "tabs" mark the "outsides" of the range. That's badly explained I know. I'm sure there are plenty of good tutorials about this on the web so I've at least given some keywords to search for. (For example, you generally can't go wrong with a Patrick David tutorial: http://blog.patdavid.net/2011/07/getting-around-in-gimp-adjusting-levels.html )

i don't know what you already tried, but most people tend to slightly modify the character width or the tracking (spacing between the characters).mostly, i do it on single paragraphs, where i see that a change in the hyphenation could add or remove a line...